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    <TITLE>API Overview</TITLE>
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    <p><b>Mime4j Core</b> provides a parser,
     <a href="org/apache/james/mime4j/parser/MimeStreamParser.html">MimeStreamParser</a>, for
     message streams in plain rfc822 and MIME format.</p>
    <p>The parser uses a callback mechanism to report parsing events such as the start of an entity
     header the start of a body, etc. If you are familiar with the SAX XML parser interface you
     should have no problem getting started with mime4j.</p>
    <p>The parser only deals with the structure of the message stream. It won't do any decoding of
      base64 or quoted-printable encoded header fields and bodies. This is intentional - the parser
      should only provide the most basic functionality needed to build more complex parsers.
      However, mime4j does include facilities to decode bodies and fields.</p>
    <p>The parser has been designed to be tolerant against messages violating the standards. It has
      been tested using a large corpus (>5000) of e-mail messages. As a benchmark the widely used
      perl MIME::Tools parser has been used. mime4j and MIME:Tools rarely differ (<25 in those
      5000). When they do (which only occurs for illegally formatted spam messages) we think mime4j
      does a better job.</p>
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